Saleni Armstrong-Hopkins

Saleni Armstrong was born in London, Ontario, the daughter of William Leonard Armstrong and Elizabeth Summers Armstrong.[1] Her father was a Union Army surgeon during the American Civil War.[2] She was raised in Michigan and Nebraska.[3]

Armstrong attended Northwestern University for a year and graduated from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1885, with an internship in gynecology and obstetrics at the Philadelphia Lying-in Charity Hospital.[4] She also studied at Mount Vernon Institute of Elocution and Languages.[5]

Armstrong founded and ran an orphanage in Platte County, Nebraska, as a young doctor. She became a medical missionary in India as a single woman in 1886, serving with her sister Willimina L. Armstrong,[6][7] and later with her husband, Methodist clergyman George Armstrong-Hopkins. She founded and directed a hospital and a nurses' training school at Khetwadi from 1887 to 1889. She was physician in charge at Lady Atchison Hospital in Lahore and a hospital in Hyderabad, Sindh from 1889 to 1893.[8] From 1893 to 1895, she was on the staff of a hospital in Omaha. She sponsored several Indian students to attend college in the United States.[5] The Armstrong-Hopkinses went to Bombay in 1912; she retired from the mission field after her husband's death in 1918.[9]

In 1899, Armstrong-Hopkins sued her superior, Methodist bishop James Mills Thoburn, for slander.[10] She sued him again in 1907 for libel, and won an award of $500.[11][12] Thoburn had claimed that Armstrong-Hopkins was spending lavishly on dresses, stockings, shoes, and hats for her Indian patients.[13] She held a medical license in Nebraska from 1894,[14] but was refused a license to practice in Washington, D. C. in 1903, when the district's board of medical supervisors questioned her credentials and asked her to sit for an examination.[15]

Books by Armstrong-Hopkins[4] included Within the Purdah (1898),[16] Fruit of Suffering (a book of poems), Pork and Mustard, and Khetwadi Castle (1900).[17] She gave lectures on her experiences in India to women's groups and at church events.[18]

In 1893, Saleni Armstrong married George Franklin Hopkins (1855-1918), as his second wife.[8] They both used the surname Armstrong-Hopkins after they married, and their legal change to the hyphenated surname made headlines in 1905.[19][20] In 1926, she was on a list of "Lost Alumnae" of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania; her alumnae association had lost track of her address.[21] Her younger sister Willimina Leonora Armstrong was known later in life as Zamin Ki Dost, a physician, writer, and lecturer on Eastern mysticism, based in Los Angeles.[22]